# Initialize State

<EpicVideo url="https://www.epicreact.dev/workshops/react-hooks/initialize-state" />

👨‍💼 We want users to be able to share a link to this page with a prefilled
search. For example:
[`https://www.example.com/search?query=cat+dog`](/app/playground?query=cat+dog).

Right now, this won't work, because we don't have a way to initialize the
state of the search box from the URL. Let's fix that.

The `useState` hook supports an initial value. Right now we're just passing
`''` as the initial value, but we can use the `URLSearchParams` API to get the
query string from the URL and use that as the initial value.

```tsx
const params = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search)
const initialQuery = params.get('query') ?? ''
```

Then you can pass that `initialQuery` to `useState`. Give that a shot and then
the link above should work!
